Sharing the failures behind a success lowered the envy others felt

The idea is that failures make you look weak. Better to let people see only what went well.

The authors note that people are often reluctant to share their failures.

The paper reports three online experiments and one field experiment with entrepreneurs, people who start businesses.

It looked at malicious envy. That means a hostile kind of envy, which the authors call destructive.

Some people heard about a person's successes only. Others heard about the successes and the failures along the way.

Sharing the failures too lowered the hostile envy that other people felt.

This held whatever the person's status. It was not because they were seen as lower in status.

The field experiment was at a pitch contest for new businesses. The authors call its evidence suggestive.

There, hearing about an entrepreneur's failures went with less hostile envy and more of a milder kind.

The entrepreneur was also seen as less arrogant and more confident.

The studies measured how observers felt. They did not follow what happened to the person who shared.

The abstract does not give the number of people. The studies did not test The Archivist Method.

Success Sabotage is the pattern of undoing things just as they start to work. You may feel it most when you are about to be seen.

Behavioral Interception is the practice of catching an automatic pattern as it begins, intercepting its usual response, and practicing a different action until it becomes more natural.

Start with the body signal, like heat in your face as someone asks how it went. Catch it and name the pattern. Then tell one true thing that went wrong on the way.